Page 6 of Devoured

The girl's face did something small and quick, a recalibration, the minor resetting of a low expectation, and was still again. "That's right," she allowed.

"This is Levi." Giana put a hand on the smaller one's shoulder, half introduction and half ownership. "He's six. He doesn't talk much to people he doesn't know."

Levi looked up at Lara from under a fall of dark hair with the unblinking attention of a child working out a puzzle. He didn't talk. He just looked, and kept looking, like she was a problem he hadn't decided yet whether he wanted to solve.

"Are you hungry?" Lara asked them, because it was three-thirty and they were children and she had learned exactly one true thing about children, which was that everything was easier on the other side of a snack.

Giana considered the question with the gravity of a customs official. "We're allowed two cookies and an apple after school," she said. "The apple first, though, or you don't get the cookies." She delivered the rule word for word, clearly someone else's, adopted as law. "Dad says."

Dad's rule. She caught herself noting it, and wished she hadn't.

She found the cookies in a jar shaped like a fat hen, and the apples in a bowl on the counter, and she gave them their two each and cut an apple into the thin even slices she used to cut for nobody, standing at the island of someone else's kitchen. Levi climbed onto a stool to watch her do it. He arranged himself very carefully, both hands flat on the counter, and watched the knife, and watched her, and something about the way he settled onto the stool, like he was getting away with it, like sitting at the counter while a grown-up cut his apple was a small and unexpected piece of good fortune, put a hairline crack in something behind Lara's ribs that she chose not to examine.

She slid the slices in front of him. He ate one, and then another, in no hurry, and the whole time he kept his eyes on her face the way he had since he walked in — not shy exactly, just careful, taking her in, working her out, the way she imagined she must look to people herself. He didn't say thank you. He didn't say anything. But when she turned back to the counter she could feel him still watching, and when she glanced over he hadn't looked away, and Giana, by the window, pretended not to have been watching the both of them and had clearly been watching every second.

Nobody had thought about dinner, so Lara made dinner.

It wasn't much — pasta, a jar of sauce doctored with what she found in the fridge, the kind of thing she could put together in a kitchen she didn't know without asking where anything was more than twice. Helen tried to take over and Lara wouldn't let her, told her to sit, to eat, to answer the phone if it rang because it was probably someone who loved them. The kids ate at the kitchen table. Giana corrected Levi's manners twice and her own never. Helen ate like a woman remembering she had a body, and somewhere in the middle of it the worst edge came off the day, the way it does around a table even when nothing is fixed.

She did the dishes. She got the kids cleaned up and handed them off to Helen at the foot of the stairs for the bath and the teeth and the rest of the bedtime rituals that belonged to this house and its people. Levi went up without protest. At the landing he turned and looked back down at her over the rail, that same puzzling look, and didn't say anything, and went.

Then it was just the office and the phone that had finally stopped, and Lara went back to it because the work was still there and the work, at least, she understood.

It was nearly nine when she let herself stop.

The house had gone quiet in stages — the kids, then the ranch hands heading to the bunkhouse, then Helen, who'd finally sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the loose, emptied look of someone who has been brave for twelve hours and has just now been allowed to stop. The two dogs that had spent the day underfoot had migrated to the office and arranged themselves over Lara's feet, heavy and warm, like she was furniture that had always been there.

She sat in the chair. His chair, she knew it was his without being told, the way the desk faced the window and the land, the way a jacket she hadn't let herself look at hung on the back of the door. His house. His coffee, gone cold in a mug she'd taken from his cabinet that morning without thinking and had been drinking out of all day. The collar of the jacket on the door was sweat-softened and shaped to a set of shoulders she'd watched cross a yard yesterday, and she was not going to think about the shoulders, and she thought about the shoulders.

The wrongness of how right it felt sat down in her chest, and she did not let herself stay with it, and it stayed with her anyway.

Why do you keep thinking about him. She actually asked herself that, sitting there in his chair with his dogs on her feet. She could still call up, with a clarity that embarrassed her, the exact weight and heat of his hand swallowing hers on the porch — calloused, warm, gone a beat too fast — twenty-four hours and one slammed door ago. She'd known the man one day. He'd insulted her and gone to a hospital, and she'd spent twelve hours running his house and his children and his telephone, and now she was sitting in the dark turning him over like a stone she couldn't put down. Get a grip, Baxter. She had crossed two thousand miles specifically to stop doing this exact thing, and here she was doing it about the rudest man in West Texas inside of twenty-four hours.

And yet.

Because there was the other thing, the thing the whole day had been quietly building, and in the quiet there was nothing left to keep it off. The man who'd slammed that screen door yesterday and looked at her shoes and decided she was nothing, that man did not square with the rest of it. He did not square with the note Levi had shown her at lunch, folded soft from a six-year-old's pocket, three words in a big careful hand: Love you, bud. He did not square with the apple first, though, or you don't get the cookies, or with the crusts she'd found cut off a sandwich in the lunchbox she'd emptied, or with a whole houseful of people who loved him so plainly and so hard that the loving had filled the gap he'd left when the day fell apart and he wasn't here.

She reached for the porch version of him, the way you reach for a railing in the dark. He's an arrogant son of a bitch who wrote you off in two minutes. That's who he is. That's the whole of him. It had held up beautifully last night. It was the thing that made her safe.

It didn’t quite cover what she'd seen today.

She told herself it did. She was good at telling herself things; she'd had three months of practice and a flawless delivery.

Headlights swung across the office wall.

A truck was coming up the drive, slow over the cattle guard, and Lara sat very still in a chair that wasn't hers with two dogs on her feet and a cold cup of his coffee going colder in her hand, and watched the lights come, and didn’t get up.

CHAPTER THREE

Dean drove home in the dark with the radio off, because he couldn't stand the sound of anyone being cheerful about anything.

The road out to the ranch was twenty minutes of nothing, and he knew every foot of it, which meant he didn't have to think about the driving, which meant there was nothing to do but think about the rest of it. His father in a bed with a tube in the back of his hand. The machines. The way John Royston, who had never in Dean's whole life looked small, had looked small.

Stable. That was the word they kept using. They were keeping him in. The stroke had been a warning, the doctor said, the kind of warning a man got to heed if he was lucky, and his father had been lucky, this time, and Dean was supposed to feel something other than the cold flat dread that had been sitting on his chest since the radio crackled that morning and Mack's voice said south pasture, now, in a tone Mack had never once used in fifteen years.

He'd run. He remembered running. He didn't remember deciding to.

The morning before it happened came back to him in pieces, the way good days do once they've been broken — sharp and useless. Levi at the counter wanting the crusts off, and Dean cutting them off because it took four seconds and the boy ate the whole sandwich when he did and left half of it when he didn't. Giana on the porch steps, tying her own boots, swatting his hand away when he reached to help because she was eight now and didn't need it, thank you. The note he'd folded into Levi's lunchbox the way he did every morning, three words, the same three words, because his son couldn't read much yet but he could read those. Love you, bud.